Why this site exists

What it does

Most holiday calendars show you a grid of dates and stop there. The useful question is not when is Diwali — it is which leave days are worth spending, and that depends on which weekday each holiday lands on.

2026 has nine long weekends that cost no leave at all, because the holiday falls on a Friday or a Monday. Spend a single leave day and 22 four-day breaks open up across 13 different festivals. The calculator finds these for you and sorts them by how soon they arrive, so you can book the next one rather than reading a list of dates that have passed.

Where the dates come from

Holiday dates are transcribed from official notifications, not aggregated from other calendar sites:

• the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) gazetted holiday list for central government offices
• the Reserve Bank of India list under section 25 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, which is what banks actually close for
• state government gazettes for the regional lists — currently Karnataka, Maharashtra, Delhi, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu

Several Indian festivals are set by lunar observation and a few state notifications land only weeks ahead, so a date can move after publication. If you spot one that has, tell us — it is the single most useful thing you can report.

How the maths works

For a given number of leave days, the solver walks the calendar looking for runs of consecutive days off, treating your weekend, the public holidays for your region, and the leave you are willing to spend as one continuous block. Two rules keep the results honest:

• Every plan must contain a real holiday. Taking Friday and Monday off around an ordinary weekend is not a long weekend, it is four days of leave.
• A plan must return at least 1.3 days off per leave day spent. Below that you are not bridging a gap, you are just taking leave, and the tool has nothing to add.

Results are then ranked by how soon they start, not by how long they are. A spectacular 18-day break next March is no use to someone deciding what to do in three weeks.

Six-day work weeks

A large share of Indian workplaces run Monday to Saturday, which changes every answer on the page — a Saturday holiday is a real day off if you normally work it, and Friday holidays stop producing three-day weekends. The work-week switch in the header re-solves the whole calendar for a six-day week rather than adjusting the display.

Your office holiday list

Most companies publish their own list, which overlaps the gazette but is never identical. The office holiday optimizer takes that list — pasted as text, or as a PDF or image — reads the dates out of it, and runs the same solver against your actual holidays.

The parsing happens in your browser. Your company's holiday list is not uploaded anywhere, which is both a privacy property and the reason the feature works without an account. There is more detail in the privacy policy.

What it does not do

Worth knowing before you rely on it:

• It covers 2026 only, plus the first days of January 2027 so that a New Year bridge can be calculated.
• Restricted or optional holidays are not modelled. Those vary per employer and are usually the interesting ones, which is what the office optimizer is for.
• It does not know your leave balance, your team's blackout dates, or whether your manager will approve anything.
• It is not a booking site and has no commercial relationship with any airline or hotel.

Who runs it

An independent project, built and maintained by one person in India. There is no company behind it, no sign-up, no newsletter and no advertising. If it is useful, the best thanks is to send a correction when a date is wrong — the address is on the contact page.